"Black magic" and white terror: slave
poisoning and colonial society in early 19th century
Martinique.

Subject:

Slaves
(Crimes against)
Poisoning
(Investigations)

Author:

Savage, John

Pub Date:

03/22/2007

Publication:

Name: Journal of Social History Publisher: Journal of Social History Audience: Academic Format: Magazine/Journal Subject: History; Sociology and social work Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Journal of Social
History ISSN:0022-4529

On October 30, 1826, the Provostial Court of Martinique delivered
its final verdict on an unwieldy criminal case involving some 30
defendants, including slaves belonging to nine different owners, several
runaways with no known master, and three free men of color. At the core
of the conspiracy was a group of five slaves whose confessions revealed
a plot aimed at "entirely ruining" two plantations by
poisoning livestock, slaves and the white masters themselves. One group
stood accused of selling the deadly, venomous powder used in the crimes,
while another provided a poisonous syrup to be used on the slavemaster.
At the same time, a woman named Martherose was said to have performed
two abortions using "harmful substances," and that "two
of her own children and one belonging to another woman seemed to have
died from poison, following threats she had made." The court
records go on to say that these offenses "do not seem entirely
proven," but the two women were nevertheless condemned to forced
labor in Senegal. Five other slaves were accused of poisoning both men
and animals, "but these charges, though very compelling, are not
completely convincing, although time could bring proof of these
crimes." The slaves in this group were not sentenced by the court
at all, but sent back to their respective masters to be disciplined.

Finally, the provost and his fellow magistrates spent some time
sorting out the case against Lubin, a freedman denounced by the slave
Hyacinth, who claimed to have seen him at a secret meeting of a societe
d'empoisonneurs. According to Hyacinth, Lubin was well known among
poisoners for having started the tradition of drinking a toast to their
fallen leader. Another slave testified that Lubin had asked him for a
protective amulet during Lent, a practice said to be common among
poisoners. Yet another slave-witness asserted that Lubin "[was]
said to be powerful in the sect of poisoners" and that he was
"well known" to have poisoned livestock on a nearby
plantation. But Lubin was defended by his former owner, la Dame Millet,
who blamed the rumors on a slave Lubin had once owned, "un negre
tres mauvais sujet who could have wanted to slander his master's
reputation." The court that decreed Lubin be watched by public
authorities, but he was given no punishment. (1)

This account of a single session of the colonial Provostial Court
provides ample evidence that slave poisoning was a phenomenon with
complex social and cultural dimensions, and raises a number of
questions. For one thing, why did magistrates see seemingly unrelated
crimes in terms of a conspiracy organized by an underground
"sect," complete with its own hierarchy, secret rituals, and
black market for various mysterious substances? The account seems to
explain murder and property damage in terms of vengeance of slaves
against masters, but was the motivation for the crimes so clearcut? Did
the presence of runaway slaves suggest that maroon communities were
behind the crimes, or rather that coordinated action between slaves and
freedmen was the norm, even as one of the freedmen implicated was
himself a slaveowner? The cases of abortion and infanticide suggest that
women played a key role. But to what extent were white views of
"poison" simply evidence that planters misunderstood African
herbalism, medicine and religious practices?

Perhaps most striking is the prevailing tone of uncertainty that
pervades the court records. The "compelling" but "not
entirely proven" charges rely on statements, often mere rumors,
made by slaves, thereby limiting the punishments magistrates could
assign. (2) It is clear the court had been extraordinarily murderous in
the months after it was created in the late summer of 1822, executing
large numbers of slaves after summary judgments, despite the fact that
evidence was often lacking. Four years on, however, the court appeared
to be assigning more moderate punishments in an effort to make them
proportionate to the certainty of guilt and safeguard the property
interests of slaveowners who objected to its methods. (3) By this time,
members of the governing council had few illusions that sentences of
forced labor or transportation to Africa would really deter criminal
activity among enslaved people. The fact that some of the accused were
simply returned to the custody of their masters demonstrates that,
rather than sparking a judicial terror, these crimes provoked a crisis
in the colonial courts. By the mid-1820s, even the martial justice of
the Provostial Court was unable to stem this most dramatic form of slave
insubordination and left many slaveowners to address it with their own
private means of discipline.

Though poisoning by slaves has been identified and studied in many
Atlantic societies, the case of Restoration era Martinique presents a
unique example of the phenomenon, both for its scale and its
periodization. In other places, historians have argued the phenomenon
was disappearing by the 19th century. In Martinique during the 1820s, on
the other hand, planters became obsessed with slave poisoning as a
threat to the very "survival of the island." In this sense,
the poisoning crimes provide an extraordinary angle from which to
examine the final phase of France's slave society. In this article,
I argue that the mass slave poisonings must be understood in terms of
the specific context of the economic and cultural pathologies of the end
of French slavery. At the intersection of tense metropolitan-colonial
relations, commercial and financial anxieties, changing racial
demographics and slave resistance, poisoning crimes brought inherent
contradictions to the surface. In the longer term the inability of
planters to quell the waves of poisoning that swept over the island
undermined their demands for autonomy from the French state, and paved
the way for a new metropolitan-colonial relationship.

Dutiful Slaves and Negres Empoisonneurs

The problem of slave poisoning was not new in 19th century
Martinique, but contemporaries claimed the phenomenon was changing.
First and foremost, planters and colonial officials were confounded by
both the ferocity and the prevalence of the crimes. This is clear in the
reports of Baron Delamardelle, an envoy sent by Louis XVIII to reform
the colonial court system. "The negres empoisonneurs spare
nothing," he wrote his superiors at the Ministry of the Navy and
Colonies, "animals, their comrades, their closest family members,
their own children all become victims. They take revenge on their master
by attacking his fortune." (4) By murdering those closest to
themselves, poisoners diverted suspicion toward others, which allowed
them to renew their crimes. With little or no physical evidence planters
were left to interrogate potential witnesses for what they might know.
Yet, as one provostial judge lamented, "neither the fear of
torture, nor the threat of punishment as accomplices to the crime will
bring slaves to denounce their comrades." (5)

Most importantly, in addition to victimizing livestock and fellow
slaves, planters claimed that slaves were poisoning their white masters,
something they insisted had not occurred in the pre-revolutionary era.
(6) This threat was accompanied by a change in planters'
understanding of who the poisoners were. In this sense, the case of
Lubin is worth remarking upon. As a freedman who enjoyed the trust of
his former mistress, to the point where she testified on his behalf in
court, he hardly fit the classic image of the slave-poisoner. During the
early decades of the 19th century, the old view of the poisoner as a
mysterious African obeah master, or as outlaw and insurgent, epitomized
by the figure of Mackandal in pre-revolutionary St. Domingue, was giving
way to a new, and to planters, far more disturbing understanding of the
crimes. (7) By the early 1820s, the colons had become preoccupied with
the idea that "poison is appearing in areas where we had succeeded
in keeping it away until now, on the plantations where the blacks are
best managed and taken care of." (8) Rather than serving as a gauge
of overly harsh treatment, as Governor Donzelot put it, poisoners
"are found principally on the plantations that are run with the
most gentleness and humanity, among the slaves who live in the best
conditions and who enjoy the greatest level of their master's
trust: the overseers, sugar refiners, livestock herders, chambermaids
and children's nurses." (9)

Many planters took up the assertion not only that loyal and dutiful
slaves were occasionally involved in the crimes, but that poisoning
almost always originated with them. At the same moment, free people of
color found themselves suspected of complicity in the poisoning crimes.
Like the focus on "dutiful slaves," the denunciation of
freedmen was another new element in the planters' view of the
problem as compared with 18th century accounts that had not typically
implicated them. The operations of the Provostial Court served to
generate and disseminate stories of such betrayals, such as an 1823
account of two female slaves "who had the sacrilegious adroitness
to disguise their intentions with an external demeanor of devotion to
the sacraments." (10) The crisis was such that it changed the way
white planters lived their lives. Observers noted how long trusted house
servants were no longer allowed indoors, nursemaids were watched at all
times while with children, and ladies used to being served would only
eat food they had prepared themselves. (11)

If it was true that poisoners were well treated or even emancipated
slaves, then what could be the motivation for the crimes? The
King's envoy, Baron Delamardelle, recounted an anecdote that
provided an explanation. A planter had spoken in front of his slaves of
his desire to return to France and give up his life in Martinique. Soon
after, poison struck both animals and slaves on his plantation. After
desperately interrogating likely suspects and being unable to uncover
the slightest clue, he finally discovered the guilty party was a trusted
slave he had treated extremely well. Asked to explain himself, the
guilty slave answered "that the fear of losing such a good master
had made him cause damage to his fortune to stop him from going back to
France." (12)

A more elaborate, as well as extreme, example is the story of an
orphaned girl of good family, raised by her caring slave nourrice,
"who replaced her lost parents with a zeal, affection and devotion
that were admired throughout the colony." On reaching marriage age,
the young woman chose an officer who took over the family estate, one of
the finest on the island. She kept her old nursemaid nearby, giving her
a cottage of her own and assigning slaves to take care of her. Within a
year, though, the estate was ruined, having been swept by a wave of
poison that decimated both slaves and livestock. Left with nothing, the
planter couple were told the old woman was involved. On confronting her,
the woman interrupted her masters' tentative questions and admitted
her crimes, "Do you think one can give a black good drink, good
food, good sleep, while giving him nothing to do? [...] Since your
marriage I've been given no work; you've given me everything I
needed, everything I could want. I had to do evil." (13)

Given the frequency of such references, the author's
contention that "there are thousands of similar stories to
tell," seems not far off the mark. A colonial doctor recounted the
following confession as an "often retold anecdote": "Eh!
it's because of your goodness that I committed so many crimes:
things were too good for me; if you'd been harder on me, as with
the others, if you had forced me to work, I wouldn't have thought
of doing it." (14) Another slave poisoner claimed to have taken
action out of the sorrow caused by seeing his beloved mistress, recently
widowed, remarried to a despised neighbor. (15) Finally, in another
shocking story, a devoted old cook, "always at mass and communion,
favored and spoiled by her masters," was discovered not only to
have poisoned their young child, but to have unburied the body, ground
up pieces of the flesh and mixed them into her mistress's food, and
even hidden the rest of the corpse under the floorboards of their house.
(16) The lesson of these stories was, as one planter put it, that
"the class of poisoners is made up almost exclusively of slaves who
are their masters' favorites ... their crimes are not brought about
by despair or excessive labor; it is rather because of laziness and the
special advantages they enjoy." (17)

Paradoxically, the proximity of those responsible for the crimes
made rooting them out all the more difficult. As a leading planter later
put it, "it was all the harder to discover [the guilty parties]
because we [were] less wary of them," (18) Part of the problem, as
white planters began to conceive of the crime, was that acts of
poisoning could not usually be traced to a single perpetrator. Most
whites adopted the belief that poisonings were not the product of
individual malefactors at all, but slaves who were controlled by a
sophisticated network of African obis: sorcerers and "black
magicians" who had special knowledge of poison. According to a
prominent planter who served as a provostial magistrate, these were true
"societes, [with] leaders, secret signs and passwords, initiation
rituals and ranks ... In a word, it is a special masonry dedicated to
poison." (19)

As a result, planters complained that standard methods of legal
procedure were ineffective precisely because of the individualized
nature of French law. Even when they found the guilty party, it was
nearly impossible to gather the necessary evidence and testimony
required for conviction. Meanwhile, the unseen network of slave
poisoners intimidated potential witnesses and covered up the crimes.
Indeed, rather than fearing the terror of the courts, it was the fear of
this powerful underground network that made so many slaves refuse to
cooperate with investigations. "One cannot doubt," wrote the
Governor in 1822, "that a large number of blacks have become
initiated to the sect of poisoners in order to be safe from its grasp
... in order to not become victims 'they' have joined the
ranks of the assassins." (20)

Poisoners posed a threat that went to the foundations of the
colonial order. Planters were adamant that poisoning of livestock or
slaves, let alone that of whites, disrupted the operations of a whole
atelier, and undermined discipline among all slaves. The loss was not to
be measured in terms of individual pieces of property, but as a threat
to the whole social fabric of the island. For this reason, it made sense
to many planters that this well organized network of poisoners was
explicitly out to overthrow the slave system itself. Certainly, stories
of Mackandal using poison as a means of political resistance were
familiar to planters and slaves alike. This threat of social
insurrection is what justified the rejection of individualistic
metropolitan legal procedures. As one magistrate put it, "in order
to succeed, we must consider judicial instruction of a poisoning case as
if it is directed against all the members of these societies; because
they all know each other, and each judgment is but a single step in this
vast procedure." (21) In this sense, just as a Provostial Court had
played a key role in counterrevolutionary backlash in France, the
colonial Provostial Court waged its own "white terror" against
rebellious slave poisoners.

In fact, just weeks after the court began its operations in the
fall of 1822, an actual slave revolt erupted near the town of Le Carbet,
leading to the deaths of several white slaveowners. Not only was this
the first attack in memory in which whites were killed, planters were
also shocked to learn that the slaves implicated in the revolt had been
close to their masters. These were trusted house slaves, "loved as
much as [their owners] loved their own children," the prominent
planter Pierre Dessalles wrote in a letter to his mother. In one case,
the guilty party was the illegitimate child of the murdered planter, a
detail all the more disturbing that so many white planters lived
surrounded by their metisse children. (22) The revolt was put down
forcefully and the insurgent slaves brought to trial, but the incident
only heightened the sense of urgency of the itinerant Provostial Courts.
In a sense, whites came to see slave poisoning as a parallel to the
Carbet revolt, that is, as the product of a conspiracy in which
otherwise obedient slaves had come under the sway of alternative, hidden
masters. The treacherous dissimulation of the dutiful slave was the all
too explicit counterpart of the underground network of resistance
controlled by master sorcerers and "black magicians."

Anxiety over control of the slave population was only exacerbated
by the so-called Affaire Bissette the following year, in which a tract
denouncing the treatment of free people of color was harshly suppressed
and its author jailed and later deported. The affaire also provoked a
full scale scandal in the French press, and helped revive the
anti-colonial movement in Parliament, at this point largely focused on
obtaining rights for freedmen. (23) In an 1823 letter, Pierre Dessalles
described the case of a group of wealthy freedmen who were convicted as
poisoners and sentenced to death just a week after receiving their
confirmation in the Church. The case bolstered his suspicion of the
priests who practiced on the island: "the [free] people of color
and the blacks believe nothing of the truths of religion," he
wrote, "they have but one thing in mind and it makes me tremble;
the destruction of whites and the overthrow of the government."
(24) By 1825, Dessalles wrote that "most people believe that the
current poisonings come from the free people, who are directing the
slaves toward evil." (25) Another planter made the connection
between slave crime and liberal reformism in the metropole explicit:
"the vociferations of the supposed amis des noirs in Parliament and
in the press have come over to us without being opposed. They have been
carefully spread among the blacks who repeat that it is the King's
will that they have their liberty, that General Donzelot and his circle
want it as well, but their masters are opposed." (26)

White Terror and Continental Reactions

Colonial resentment over political trends in France or continental
interference in local courts did nothing to endear metropolitan
officials to creole planters. On the contrary, the tensions seemed to
have made French officials more skeptical of both poisoning claims and
colonial institutions more generally. (27) The King's envoy, Baron
Delamardelle, for one, became increasingly critical of the Provostial
Court. His report on specific court cases, drafted in 1826, provides a
sense of what some French observers objected to in the court's
operations. Delamardelle's report examined two decisions from the
town of St. Esprit. The first case revolved around a mother and son,
Angelique and Auguste-Charles, both freed slaves who stood accused of
poisoning. As the Baron noted, the prosecution was not initiated by
white landowners, but when neighbors submitted a petition demanding
their expulsion from the colony.

A number of witnesses were heard, all of whom repeated that the two
had reputations as poisoners, and that Auguste's dead father had
himself been "a great master." One witness claimed he had once
been threatened by Auguste, explaining:

The next witness described Auguste's mother, Angelique, as
"also famous among people as a witch." In the court record,
this phrase was followed by the word poisoner in parentheses. But a
white planter then testified on Angelique's behalf. Though
"she passes for more powerful than her son," he said, "I
don't think she did me any harm; she often announces that she is
lighting candles in Church and making novenas so that God will punish
those who say bad things about her son; and she says that all the harm
that's been done to the landowners is the result of Divine Justice
punishing those who slander him." (29)

The substance of the case against Angelique had to do with her
service as midwife on a nearby plantation. According to several
witnesses, all of the newborn children had been healthy there until the
master replaced her with another woman. Soon after, a slave mother lost
her newborn child and claimed Angelique had killed her baby to take
revenge for losing her post. Though she had been a successful midwife
elsewhere, the new woman did not "succeed" with babies on this
plantation, and the expectant mothers reportedly had terrible stomach
pains. Finally, the master asked Angelique to come back, and since then
the newborns were again healthy. It was the white planter who could not
help but conclude that "Angelique has the high science of the
poisoners." (30)

Because her son Auguste had fled on being indicted by the court,
which the magistrates saw as a sure sign of his guilt, only the seventy
year old Angelique could be questioned directly. She denied all the
allegations against her, and explained her unfortunate reputation with
the following testimony:

In the second case, Josaphat, a slave who had been the personal
cook of former Governor Donzelot, stood accused of having seduced a
pharmacist's slave girl in order to get hold of some arsenic. To
this end, he enlisted the help of his brother and cousin, both slaves of
the royal prosecutor himself, but the young woman refused to give him
any arsenic. The court devoted much of its effort to discovering what
Josaphat intended to do with the poison. Suspicion fell on his
relationship with a slave woman he had attempted to have hired as a cook
by the prosecutor, Maitre Girard. The latter refused because, as the
investigation showed, his housekeeper la demoiselle Modeste would not
allow it. "It may be," the court concluded, "this arsenic
was destined for this woman who stood in the way of the plans of
Josaphat and his concubine." (32)

Baron Delamardelle's point by point review of these cases
betrays a tone of criticism, even outrage, coupled with moments of wry
sarcasm. In the case of Josaphat, first of all, the Baron wrote that the
whole scenario about poisoning Modeste to get a position for his partner
was totally unsubstantiated, and "results from a rich and lively
imagination." The idea that attempting (unsuccessfully) to purchase
some arsenic could result in sentence of hard labor for life provoked
his ire, not out of humanitarian concern for the slave, but as a jurist
confronted with flagrant contempt for legal forms: "No sir, there
is in no Code such a barbaric disposition that assigns such a punishment
for such an action." Reviewing the other case Delamardelle
concluded that "what we learn from all this testimony is that
Angelique and her son are seen by others as poisoners." But no hard
evidence had been presented, and the court had not even taken the
trouble to name those thought to have been their victims or attempted
victims, leaving him wondering whether the instruction process had been
borrowed from the medieval past. (33)

Over time, reports like these led officials to question the
longstanding autonomy of colonial institutions, as well as planter
claims of victimization at the hands of malevolent slaves. At the same
time, an increasing number of court cases like those criticized by
Delamardelle were being brought to appeal in France. These cases,
brought in situations where there had not been sufficient proof to
assign capital punishment, were often initiated by slaveowners angered
by their loss of property, although it is possible affective concerns
sometimes played a role. Indeed, these efforts to intervene can be read
as a gauge of how difficult it was for some slaveholders to abandon
their most devoted slaves in a society where planters were often
physically isolated from other whites, and for whom enslaved people were
omnipresent in their intimate lives.

In other cases, it was the enslaved themselves who appealed their
convictions, such as a group of eight slaves who collectively contested
a provostial decision of November 1823. (34) These appeals were all the
more extraordinary that, technically speaking, all decisions of the
Provostial Court were final; there was no option for review. Yet this
did not stop France's highest jurisdiction, the Court of Cassation,
from hearing the appeal of Marie-Louise Lambert, a free woman of color
convicted by the Provostial Court. As in other appeals, the fact the
convicted woman had been transported to France for imprisonment allowed
her to take advantage of a network of sympathetic whites. Her case, for
example, was taken up by the prominent anti-colonial spokesman
Francois-Andre Isambert, who also served as counsel to Cyrille Bissette
in the widely publicized Affaire des hommes de couleur. Though the high
court ultimately found it could not break the verdict, her sentence was
nevertheless reduced, an outcome that characterized a number of similar
cases. (35)

Skepticism grew among metropolitan observers with the revelation of
the excesses of the Provostial Court and its failure to stem the tide of
crime. How was it, wrote Baron Delamardelle to the Ministry, that
despite harshly sentencing fifteen to twenty slaves at a time, the
supposed chefs among the poisoners always managed to elude the itinerant
magistrates? (36) It was cases like these that helped convince
metropolitan authorities to do away with the colonial Provostial Court
altogether by the end of 1826, a move that accompanied the replacement
of Governor Donzelot, relieved of his duties for consistently siding
with the most ardently independent-minded planters. In addition to the
procedural irregularities that drew the ire of Baron Delamardelle, the
sheer ineffectiveness of the court no doubt also played a role. After an
initial drop in their number, poisonings continued to strike throughout
this period, even at times in the specific areas where the court was
operating. In the end, the spectacular terror intended by public
executions may also have come across more as spectacle than terror by
black onlookers, with all of this display leading some to remark simply
that the victim had had "un bel enterrement." (37)

The suppression of the Provostial Court signaled a new era in
metropolitan-colonial relations, one in which administrators were more
skeptical of colonial claims and planters were left disaffected from the
court system and fearful about the future of the colony. The skepticism
of officials like Baron Delamardelle eventually led to a more systematic
examination of the phenomenon of slave poisoning that would underscore
the distance between the French authorities and the local planter elite.
It was certainly not the first time someone in an official capacity had
questioned the exact nature and extent of poisoning crimes. The official
annals of the governing council, for example, contain several
discussions of the poisoning problem during the 18th century, including
one in which a council member stated: "I have seen their
concoctions produced several times at trial; I even once had some dug up
that had been buried in my fields, and as much as I examined them, I
found nothing that could cause death, even to an ant." (38)

In Saint Domingue, the other colony where poisoning outbreaks were
most severe in the 18th century, a group of colonial doctors formed an
association in the 1780s to combat the false ideas on the subject held
by so many planters, and to promote the idea that most deaths ascribed
to poison were in fact caused by epizootic livestock diseases. (39) Even
the creator of the Provostial Court, Governor Donzelot, privately
expressed his uncertainty about the stories when he first arrived in the
colony, initially reporting back to Paris that "the facts described
were for the most part accompanied by circumstances that were so
bizarre, and that supposed such an extreme and gratuitous perversity on
the part of the accused, that at times ... [I] had trouble believing in
their reality." (40)

In response to the continued claims of victimization made by
planters in the wake of the suppression of the Provostial Court, a
colonial doctor undertook a systematic medical study of the poisonings.
Dr. Rufz de Lavison served as a civilian assessor for the Royal Court of
Martinique in the 1830s, where the evidence presented in several
poisoning cases provoked his skepticism. (41) With the support of
Governor Val d'Ailly, itself testimony to a new political context
in the islands, he formed a commission that analyzed more than twenty
substances drawn from roots, flowers, barks, leaves, glass, metals and
sea creatures and their effects on various livestock, dogs or human
subjects, including himself. His experiments included extracting snake
venom and feeding it to horses and feeding a cow twelve pounds of feared
Brinvilliers herbs, named for the notorious female poisoner of the court
of Louis XIV. He recorded the minute effects on the physical state,
energy level and stool of the animal, and whether they consumed the
substances willingly in various forms. Though the forensic analysis of
poisons was in its infancy, he referred to scientific studies of the
substances when available. (42)

Dr. Rufz was by no means the first observer to point out that
colonial surgeons had little real medical expertise, and that their
ignorance reinforced the planters' willingness to see criminal
mischief behind their misfortunes. Indeed, though the surgeons had
little training, they often became closely linked with great landowning
families, making their judgments all the more suspect. (43) It was the
lack of experience and skill of these practitioners that made it common
for autopsies to confirm the presence of poison in cases where lesions
on internal organs were caused by tropical fevers. In fact, Rufz argued
that the aggregate death rate among livestock in Martinique followed a
regular pattern that belied the role of slave crime. His detailed
statistical study of the importation of horses, mules and cattle
suggested that poor supply lines from Europe, rather than poison, were
to blame for sparse herds of livestock. Such evidence did not matter to
planters, he wrote, since they were positively obsessed with diabolical
conspiracies as the only possible explanation for their misfortunes.
(44)

The association between poisoning deaths and a range of diseases is
not inconsistent with reports of other contemporaries. Discussing the
mysterious waves of "yellow fever" that seemed to accompany
times of great rainfall, Paul Dhormoys speculated that "yellow
fever is simply a poisoning caused by harmful miasmas that we breathe
in" during the humid weather. (45) It was commonly believed by
whites that contagious diseases were especially prevalent during the
long rainy season known as l'hivernage, which was also when
hurricanes were likely to strike. (46) Others commonly associated slave
poisonings with this season: "it is during the time of epidemics
that they usually choose to exercise their crimes most freely,"
wrote one doctor. (47) Using the same sort of assumption, Governor
Donzelot concluded his report on the Carbet slave revolt by writing
"it is always during the season of l'hivernage that plots are
revealed." (48)

Recent medical history provides at least some support for
Rufz's claims. Genevieve Leti does not make the argument herself,
but her research provides strong anecdotal evidence that outbreaks of
yellow fever correlate with the deaths attributed to slave poisoning,
and that planters contributed to the contagion out of ignorance. (49)
Meanwhile, Richard Sheridan has emphasized the huge mortality rates
associated with dysentery, influenza and pleurisies, especially among
newly arrived Africans. (50) In this same period, doctors in Europe
discovered that Asiatic Cholera provoked symptoms very similar to those
of arsenic poisoning, making misdiagnosis a common problem. (51)
Finally, natural disasters such as hurricanes also had a direct impact
on death rates, and recent scholarship has suggested how hard it was for
creole whites to adapt their economic calculations to the effects of
such calamities. (52)

In concluding his study, Dr. Rufz stated clearly, first of all,
that isolated instances of human, and perhaps also livestock, poisoning
did occur in Martinique. He had identified three available substances
that were at least potentially poisonous: arsenic, the sap of
mancenillier trees, and manioc juice. The problem was that the
quantities necessary for these substances to kill not just one person or
cow or horse, but dozens of mules, cattle, or slaves, would be enormous.
Even to kill one animal would require several bottles of manioc juice
force fed in a short span of time. As for arsenic, its sale was tightly
controlled on the island, and it would require not just a few grains but
half an ounce or more to kill a single large animal. Besides, he argued,
most of the human deaths attributed to poison manifested symptoms more
reminiscent of cholera or dysentery than arsenic. Gathering, storing and
administering such quantities of poison would be a complex undertaking
to say the least, and would necessarily leave a trail of clues in the
event it caused death, which took recognizably different forms according
to the substance used. "I can conceive," he wrote, "of
the partial poisoning of one or several people, or of a horse or a cow;
but organized and repeated poisonings en masse, to the point of
imitating an epizooty, impossible!" (53)

Beyond Skepticism

The writings of Dr. Rufz de Lavison are an extraordinary resource
for the wealth of detail they provide about slave crimes, white
responses, and the material conditions of slavery in Martinique. His
study also reveals something important about changing metropolitan views
of this plantation society. The results of his experiments inexorably
pointed to "the ignorance" of colonial planters when it came
to livestock disease. The implications of his findings were clear: white
planters misread straightforward material evidence because of their
paranoid obsession with slave revolt. Late in life, he came back to the
subject to bolster this thesis by asserting that poisonings disappeared
in Martinique after the abolition of slavery in 1848. (54) In this
sense, Rufz was arguing for a direct link between poison crimes and the
condition of slavery itself. From the perspective of the
"modern" European medicine that Rufz embodied, belief in
poison was no more than mere superstition, evidence of both African
backwardness and the reign of ignorance and fear among white creoles.
Above all, it was a sure sign that true civilization could only come
through reform initiated by the metropolitan authorities.

There is much in Rufz's account of poisoning that helps
illuminate some of its more mysterious dimensions. It is clear, for
example, that many of the substances said to be used in the crimes were
perfectly harmless, that medical practitioners were not only untrained,
but actually thrived on the business of questionable autopsies, and that
at least some poison outbreaks resembled livestock disease in a number
of ways. At the same time, however, his purely "materialist"
explanations can only go so far. Most importantly, his otherwise
exhaustive studies all but exclude attention to the practices of slaves
themselves, other than to dismiss them as superstitious "black
magic." Because of this, his observations must be combined with one
in which the role of slaves is re-placed at the center of events, just
as the crimes were understood by both white and black contemporaries.

In her work on African healing practices in the Caribbean,
Christiane Bougerol has emphasized the way slavemasters perceived slave
medicine as a threat to their authority. She argues that the advent of
Enlightenment models of nature and the body made poisoning claims
disappear by the end of the 18th century, thus sealing the hegemony of
an imperial worldview. (55) In Martinique, however, despite the presence
of "Enlightened" observers, poison not only persisted, but
whites made it the most dramatic justification of the slave system. And
far from transforming backward colonial practices, recent scholarship
has shown just how ineffective European medicine was in the islands.
(56) In fact, the incompetence of most colonial pharmacists and surgeons
coupled with the lack of medical supplies from Europe meant that many
whites still looked to "la pharmacopee noire" for their
medical needs well into the 19th century. (57)

These observations suggest, first of all, that we should avoid
taking "poison" as a known and given object, to be
"discovered" or dismissed according to predetermined
definitions. Its cultural meanings were multiple and coexisting, whether
for African or Creole slaves, local planters or metropolitan physicians.
This point has been emphasized in recent scholarship on the phenomenon
of obeah in Caribbean slave societies, which has shown how medical and
spiritual practices inherited from African cultures were often
misunderstood and recast as "black magic" by anxious white
planters. (58) Philip Morgan, for example, emphasizes that it is most
useful to think of "poison" as the whites' term for a
range of practices of conjuring or intentionally harmful sorcery. (59)
For this reason, paradoxically, the idea that liberal ideas and the hope
for freedom were behind the poisonings is in some ways an interpretation
fundamentally shaped by the perspective of planters. (60)

In African societies, the obeah master attended to matters of
cosmic and collective, as opposed to purely physical and individual,
importance. In this sense, in addition to physical healing, slave
doctors "were experts in the prevention, diagnosis, and cure of
misfortune." What Europeans would understand as accidents, illness
or the "natural causes" of death were seen as the result of
spiritual forces or, in some cultures, the product of deliberate
ill-will in the form of witchcraft or poison. Yet "poison"
could also refer to substances used in order to "set things
right" in the face of social or spiritual conflict. (61) Though
planters in Martinique tended to use the African-derived word obi to
speak of magical practices in a general way, they spoke of
"poison" when they suspected criminal intent. The usage
suggests the planters' broad inability to distinguish between
herbalism or "sacred science" on one hand, and efforts to harm
others, whether through conjuring or the use of noxious substances, on
the other. Therefore, accounts of "poison" that invariably
come to us mediated by white observers have already made an
interpretation of events or actions that may have had very different
meanings for enslaved people.

The competing cultural meanings of poison must also be understood
in relation to the changing historical context of slavery. Along with
Bougerol and other scholars, Jerome Handler's work on the case of
Barbados suggests that obeah became less prevalent as the proportion of
African born slaves declined in the final decades of the 18th century.
In fact, Handler shows that even as whites tended to emphasize the
negative and treacherous nature of obeah, the practices themselves were
falling into disuse. (62) This analysis is especially notable in that
conditions were best for the survival of African cultures in Barbados.
(63) In Martinique, on the other hand, planters claimed poison was
spreading on an unprecedented scale in the 1820s, and that the authors
of the crimes had very different motivations and intentions compared to
previous times.

Was there anything different about Martinique's slave
population in this period? Recent work on the Atlantic slave trade
offers some suggestive possibilities. For one thing, there was a
dramatic shift in the provenance of newly enslaved Africans at the very
end of the 18th century. According to David Eltis's Dubois
database, in the early decades of the 19th century, the Bight of Biafra
was the origin of some sixty percent of the trade, where only a small
percentage of slave ships heading for Martinique originated there during
the previous century. (64) Douglas Chambers has argued that most slaves
from the trading ports of the Bight of Biafra could trace their heritage
to the Igbo peoples of the hinterland, where obeah practices and
poisoning were particularly well-established. Chambers argues that an
"Igboized" slave culture emerged in Virginia due to the
numerical predominance of slaves imported from Biafran ports, in an
example of the relatively direct transmission of culture from Africa to
the Americas. (65)

The idea that this influx of African slaves can help explain an
increase and transformation of slave poisoning is appealing. It is
indirectly supported by the fact that overall, the trade from the Bight
of Biafra was in decline at precisely the moment it became the principal
source for Martinique, a detail that reinforces anecdotal suggestions
that Igbo slaves may have been considered undesirable in many Caribbean
ports, perhaps because they were prone to resistance. (66) The argument
also has the advantage of explaining why accusations of poisoning were
less likely to involve human deaths after 1830, the year the illegal
slave trade was finally curbed. During the July Monarchy (1830-1848),
those poisoning cases that did go before the courts tended to focus on
the simple possession or procurement of noxious substances, as opposed
to actual acts of poisoning. (67)

But while the Igbo immigration may well have played a role in the
slave poisonings, the shift in the origin of slaves can only serve as a
partial explanation. After all, the majority of slaves from the Bight of
Biafra went to ports in the British Caribbean for most of the 18th
century, and while poisoning existed in Jamaica and Barbados, it was
generally a much more limited phenomenon. (68) And surely it is more
difficult for an otherwise politically stable, established and creolized
slave society to have been "Igboized" than one that was still
just a few generations from its origins. Meanwhile, though there were
exceptions, slaves who held onto African cultural identities would also
be those least likely to find themselves in the position of the trusted
domestic servants who came under suspicion in this period. (69)

At the same time, several scholars have questioned the extent to
which a unified Igbo culture was the common background of slaves who
embarked at the Bight of Biafra, arguing that Igbo identity only came
into being once Africans from highly localized cultures came into
contact with each other in the Americas. (70) Others have emphasized the
very different regions slaves came from before being funneled into the
small number of ports of departure, and the shifting focus of the trade
over time. And of course still other historians have found obeah and
witchcraft to be prevalent among slaves from several other African
regions. (71)

In fact, the only direct reference to the "ethnicity" of
poisoners in Martinique comes to us from Baron Delamardelle, who was
told that poisoners came especially from "Popo," a name that
referred to one of two African trading ports, or the nationality of
slaves in a region of the Bight of Benin. (72) It seems that any strong
correlation between poisoning and the Igbo would not have gone
unremarked, however, especially since a major source of white anxiety
was the extraordinary network of associations serviles that were grouped
according to their African "nations" of origin. Yvan Debbasch
has shown that there were no fewer than seventeen of these associations
in each of Martinique's two major towns in the late 1820s, and they
can serve as a powerful illustration of the theory that ethnogenesis was
largely the product of urban contexts in the Americas. (73)

As Kristin Mann has written, it is necessary to go beyond a
simplistic opposition between "Africanist" and
"Creolist" interpretations of New World slave cultures, toward
an appreciation of the dynamic evolution of the processes of syncretism
and acculturation that were fundamentally shaped by specific contexts.
(74) While Igbo customs are recognizable in some practices of Caribbean
obis, the intensity and prevalence of poisoning belie any kind of
"traditional" use of magic or medicine. These practices
adapted, moreover, to a very different social context than that of the
British islands in the 18th century. With the end of the official slave
trade and the specter of the Haitian Revolution, planters increasingly
understood the world they had made to be under siege. This was true
because of the revival of abolitionism in Europe, but more concretely,
also because of the changing realities of the Atlantic sugar economy.

As Dale Tomich has shown, changes in the world economy meant the
work regimen of industrial sugar production became markedly more
rigorous in the 1820s, with the difference between solvency and
bankruptcy often a question of extracting greater surplus from slave
labor. (75) The decreasing tolerance for the illegal trade in this same
period made harsh discipline seem more imperative. This economic
connection was implied by Dr. Rufz de Lavison, who suggested that the
mortality rates of both livestock and enslaved people were highest when
the outcry over poison was at its peak. If a slaveowner acquired twenty
new slaves and ten of them died in short order, he claimed, it was
poison rather than the harshness of their new life that would be blamed.
(76)

Records of the governing council also confirm that the island faced
great difficulties in providing basic foodstuffs to slaves in this
period. In a direct challenge to the cliches repeated by white planters,
Dr. Rufz echoed those observers, including Baron Delamardelle, who
pointed to the extremely poor physical state of most slaves as a
potential cause of otherwise unexplained mortality. Of course,
malnutrition contributed mightily to their susceptibility to disease.
More directly, Gabriel Debien describes how planters would sometimes
sell cows that had outlived their usefulness to slaves during the 18th
century, a practice that likely continued in this period. He goes on to
note a case where slaves were "poisoned" by eating the meat of
donkeys and cattle that may have died from epizootic disease, as well as
an instance of a slave dying after eating a crab that had itself been
poisoned by mancenillier. (77)

Failing a true industrialization of production as would occur in
Cuba, planters focused on intensified work discipline. This meant, among
other things, that the longstanding habit of petit marronage that had
served as a kind of safety valve to release tensions between masters and
slaves was less tolerated than in the past. Some evidence of how this
dynamic worked can be found in the letters of Pierre Dessalles. Each
time he heard of a poison outbreak on a neighboring plantation, he wrote
in 1824, he would step up the "firmness" of his management,
"to stop the evil from getting to us." The following year he
wrote his mother that poisoning continued to wreak havoc in the area,
but "our losses are slow; we owe it to [our] severe discipline and
great vigilance." (78)

But Dessalles's "firm management" also contributed
to the high rate of slave suicides, abortions and infanticides he
complained of, and his correspondence also shows how the fear of poison
led neighboring planters to suspect each other of laxity, since their
fate seemed to rest on the whims of slaves who resided nearby. (79) Of
course, for planters, blaming deaths on poisoning conspiracies was
easier than confronting the reality of systematic mistreatment.
Increasingly violent efforts at social control may well have contributed
to increasing acts of slave resistance, even if the "poisons"
used were not actually lethal. (80)

Resituating Slave Resistance

Because poison crimes were both direct attacks on property and
undermined the discipline and productivity of a whole habitation, it is
not difficult to imagine why planters were vigilant to the point of
paranoia. In this sense, though accusations of poisoning were surely, at
times, merely panicked reactions to a financially crippling livestock
disease, they also reflected the fundamentally new atmosphere of fear,
and new dynamic of slave resistance, that characterized the period
following the Haitian Revolution. (81)

On one hand, it is clear that conjuring, magic and sorcery were
intensified in the New World at a time when, as Philip Morgan puts it,
resorting to such practices "seemed especially appropriate in new
and disorienting conditions." (82) The specific nature of
obeah's relationship to social and kinship structures could also
explain why the more traditional habit of limiting harmful efforts to
other slaves might finally have given way to direct attacks on whites.
(83) Further, as Jerome Handler has suggested, the context of new world
slavery could lead to a dynamic in which exaggerated white views of the
"dark" and "evil" nature of obeah could eventually
lead slaves to adopt similar views. (84) White views of obeah and their
panicked reactions to the crimes could therefore shape slave culture.

In this perspective, "poison" increasingly became the
idiom of the day, not because of its significance in African cultures,
but in European ones. In France, the poison scandals of the court of
Louis XIV meant that poison would long be associated with the
sophisticated subterfuges of aristocratic women, often in efforts to
gain financial independence through the control of inheritance. The
nearly hysterical response to the scandals in French society have been
linked to deep felt anxieties over threats to the authority of the
paterfamilias, and therefore to the social fabric itself. (85) As the
quintessential "weapon of the weak," poison retained a strong
association with women through the 19th century. In the Caribbean,
however, it was not that the crimes were mainly carried out by women,
but that like women, slaves were seen as passive subjects and deemed
incapable of more direct forms of resistance. (86) In this way, the
"poisoning" crisis in Martinique provides a concrete example
of how obeah was transformed in the new world setting, in part through a
mixing of African traditions, in part due to the changing nature of
slave labor, and in part because of the white social imaginary.

Vincent Brown has argued that in Jamaica, the plantocracy
"tried to place its own authority above human contestation by
alternately appropriating and censuring the spiritual authority of the
enslaved." (87) This appropriation implied a recognition, an
acknowledgement of the reality of the obeah master's power
alongside of efforts to control it. Indeed, plantation owners in
Martinique often described African sorcerers in almost supernatural
terms, as only such forces could explain the sinister influence that led
slaves to kill their masters, others of their own race, close family
members and even their own children. To cite an 18th century
description, echoed in later accounts:

In the 1820s, Dhormoys recounted the story of an old woman
denounced as a poisoner by her fellow slaves who was asked to provide
proof of her magical powers. Bring six mules down this path, she
demanded. The mules went no more than fifty steps when all six fell to
the ground. "Good" she said, instructing the planter to dig a
hole in that spot. According to the account, "at a fairly great
depth they found a handkerchief holding some hair, nails, and a small,
newly severed finger." Remove these items and the mules will be
able to pass, she told them, and the mules were suddenly able to walk
over the spot where they had previously fallen. (89)

When whites accepted and retold poison stories third and fourth
hand, they only magnified the aura of the obeah masters that led the
"sect of poisoners." It was precisely the idea that poison
could be controlled from afar and administered slowly that allowed
whites to see virtually any disease as a poisoning. Many whites also
used their own black diviners and sorcerers both to identify the guilty
parties and to take revenge upon them. Whites feared that those slaves
who used talismans and magical practices were those most likely to
challenge their authority, to engage in marronage and commit other
crimes because they felt invincible. But when white victims kept the
hearts of the animals that died and stabbed them with nails in order to
inflict pain on the guilty slaves, they were propping up the power of
"black magic" as much as any slave. (90)

Indeed, panic over poisoning actually led whites to build up the
magical powers of slaves. When Governor Donzelot wrote that many
planters were certain slaves had destroyed livestock and murdered humans
"par des malefices," he exemplified this tendency. (91) In
another example, a leading provostial magistrate earnestly recounted the
story of slaves who poisoned a priest and fed his remains to a pig whose
flesh was then distributed around the island by spirits in order to be
eaten by leaders of the sect. (92) What emerges from such details is a
picture of colonial society in which, far from dominating or suppressing
traditional spiritual practices, whites absorbed and even magnified
them. (93)

It is also clear that while many slaves were victims of the
spectacular terror stoked by white panic, some enslaved people also used
white fears for their own purposes. One example can be found in a story
told by Moreau de Jonnes about a slave "spoiled by the good deeds
of his master," who one day admitted, though he was not even
suspected of the crime, that it was he who had poisoned his master,
mistress and their young child, all of whom had died within a two week
period with symptoms that suggested dysentery. Brought before the
special tribunal, he calmly declared that all those slaves who had died
with similar symptoms, many of whom were among his family and friends,
had also been victims of his poison. Completely impassive, he recounted
the details of each crime, shocking the court, which condemned him to
death. At the execution, "he maintained the same indifference with
which he had retraced his crimes and provoked his punishment." (94)

In the late 1830s, a freedman who owned a plantation known for the
good will and good health of its slaves was suddenly hit by a wave of
poisoning that devastated both slaves and livestock, leaving him ruined.
Soon after, a slave who lay on his death bed on a nearby plantation
summoned the landowner. The slave asked forgiveness for his crimes; it
was he who had caused the deaths. "But why?" the planter
asked, "what did we do to you? Nothing, added the dying man, but my
master always criticized us because the work of your slaves brought you
more revenue than he had." (95) While the truth of such stories is
by definition unverifiable, they nevertheless suggest the appeal that
"confessing" to poisoning crimes might have had for some
slaves. As we have already seen in the provostial case reviewed by
Delamardelle, reputed poisoners could intimidate both slaves and whites.
Though this may not amount to the kind of resistance posited by some
scholars, such accounts certainly confirm the willful agency of the
enslaved.

Denouncing those guilty of poisoning was also a role that gave
slaves importance and some degree of power, though it was sometimes
linked to more mundane concerns. The obligation to denounce other slaves
under threat of torture meant that those accused were often
"selected" through a popular decision that reflected the
collective suspicions of a community of slaves. The governing council
actually records one large case in which more than thirty slaves were
handed over, noting they had been accused "either by their masters
or by la clameur publique." (96) Yet such choices may have been as
likely to feed into petty ambitions, jealousies and rivalries among
slaves as to serve as a vector for concerted rebellion. As David Geggus
points out, "for Africans who attributed misfortune to witchcraft,
it may be that resignation or resort to counterwitchcraft seemed a more
appropriate response than rebellion." (97)

The degree of control slaves had over those accused of the crimes
can also help explain the paradox of the "dutiful slave"
poisoner. At the height of the poisoning wave that hit his plantation in
1824, for example, Pierre Dessalles wrote that his slaves were pointing
to one of his most trusted "favorites," Eusebe, as the guilty
party. Dessalles could not believe it at first, but then confided to his
mother that he felt pressure to act on the suspicions: "Having been
denounced everywhere," he wrote, "it would be impolitic to let
him remain free." Confronted by another slave implicated in the
crimes, Eusebe denied the allegations, but within a few weeks the
discovery of another dead cow led Dessalles to deliver him to the
Provostial Court, which had him executed. (98) The case of Eusebe
suggests how the petty resentments of the slave hierarchy might play out
in such a way as to bring those seen as most "dutiful" under
suspicion. One effect of the poison panics, then, was to effectively
polarize the races by undermining those slaves, so crucial to
slaveholder ideology, who lived in close affective proximity with their
masters. (99)

Though Eusebe and many other "trusted" slaves were male,
it is clear that women often occupied a special position within the
master's household and more often had access to the interior
domestic space. Indeed the "household" was dual on many
plantations, with masters surrounded by children of a slave mistress.
There is some evidence that the spurned slave concubine would sometimes
resort to poisoning, and certainly the obscure accounts of mysterious
abortifacients and apparent infanticides seem most often to implicate
female slaves. (100) But in other cases the role of gender is less
predictable. In one case a group of enslaved children, aged from seven
to eighteen years old, was found guilty of attempting to poison their
white mistress. Under interrogation, they confessed to having been put
up to the crime by a house servant, angry that her mistress would not
release her to work in the fields. The unusual demand came because of a
relationship with a man that led her to want to live in her own case.
Here, the affective rivalries and interpenetration of private life among
masters and slaves suggest the complex situations generated by the
"intimacies of empire." (101)

Conclusion

In a telling formulation, in an effort to help a continental
correspondent understand the situation, one planter suggested that
"poisoning in Martinique is organized in the same way as the
Carbonari in Europe." (102) The analogy to the underground struggle
for national liberation illustrates the way slaveowners saw poisoning as
a fundamentally political act. They feared the implicit bond among
slaves that could only oppose their authority and discipline, and saw a
"special masonry" where slaves may have been more focused on
mundane preoccupations than fundamental political change. If the bloody
uprising of Saint Domingue had become, along with the Reign of Terror
itself, the purest symbol of anarchic revolutionary violence, then the
image of the slave-poisoner recalled this dark legacy in the form of
repeated acts of individual desperation.

After the suppression of the Provostial Court at the end of 1826,
the new Governor sent word that poison was once again on the rise. It
had recently spread throughout the countryside, into the towns, even
into the homes of prominent notables who found themselves forced to
distance themselves from old servants they used to trust. Like his
predecessors, the governor repeated the claim that a secret, underground
network was responsible for the crimes: "[our] society does not
have to defend itself against isolated criminals," he complained,
"it must struggle against a whole population that is tightly
unified and under the influence

of a doctrine of death." Echoing the planters around him, the
governor explained it was a mistake to think poisoning was provoked by
cruel treatment. Rather, the cause of the crimes was to be found in
"a complete and deeply rooted demoralization" of the slave
population, and he was concerned that the loss of the Provostial Court
had "struck at the heart of legal power, and [colonial] society
itself." (103)

Yet rather than support colonial planters in their efforts to
suppress these invidious crimes, metropolitan officials seemed to become
more skeptical of them. In the end, the dramatic claims of slave
betrayal left the colons open to the charge that it was slavery itself
that was the cause of this moral degradation, as opposed to some
essential malevolence slaves had brought with them from Africa. In fact,
before the abolitionist movement was fully revived, the image of the
slave poisoner was probably conveyed to the French public most
effectively through literary accounts that used poison as a conceit to
dramatize the horrors of slavery. Though they were sometimes set in the
past or in non-French islands, novels like Victor Hugo's Bug Jargal
(1826) or Eugene Sue's Atar-Gull (1831) used depictions of African
witchcraft to draw the attention of their readers to the dire situation
in the French colonies. And although they were infused with a colonial
perspective, these stories did not portray white colonists as innocent
victims. In the years that followed, Victor Schoelcher himself adopted
the idea that slaves were using the "weapons of the weak" to
overthrow the slave system, while also making poisoning one of the great
symbols of the evils of slavery. (104) In doing so, however, he relied
heavily on the accounts of planters just as state officials were
questioning their validity.

As late as 1842, the same year that Victor Schoelcher expressed his
solidarity with slave-poisoners, Governor Huc lashed out against the
chorus of criticism from France in a speech to the sovereign council,
angrily declaring that "there is no epizooty, there hasn't
been an example of one in two centuries; there are no dead animals;
there are only those who are sick because of poison." (105) The
colons' stubborn attachment to the narrative of their own
victimization gives us a sense of the psychological dynamic at work
among slaveholders. Whether male or female, the idea that slaves were
being treated too well was an essential component of a whole worldview.
Given the threats of slave revolt and marronage, increasing financial
pressures at home and growing abolitionism in France, white panic over
poison epidemics functioned in terms of a kind of myth of
insubordination and rebellion, an epic framework that justified their
vision of colonial society.

As the end of the slave trade created a perceived need to enforce
greater plantation discipline, this myth was a way to criminalize the
behavior of the slave population as a whole and juridicize the social
tensions generated by slavery. The collective perception that prevailed
among whites asserted the inability of even the most trusted slaves to
be educated and civilized, and also served as proof of the absence of
sovereign will in these slaves, that other, unseen forces, were their
masters. In a strange symmetry, the sorcerers who supposedly led
poisoning networks acted as the counterpart to the absolute (legal)
ownership that masters claimed over their slaves. In this perspective,
poison and obeah were not so much legacies of a bygone, barbaric past,
as they were traditional cultural forms newly invigorated and
transformed in response to white scrutiny, changing economic realities,
and the extension of state power. (106)

At a time when the creolization of the slave population heightened
fears of demographic imbalance, poisoning scares also served to
demarcate the races. It was precisely at the moment outsiders implored
planters to extend the rights of freedmen as their only chance to save
the slave system that planters drew a conspiratorial connection between
slave poisoners and the gens de couleur. Conflating merchant freedmen
and "black magicians" brought together the deepest of white
anxieties: racial resentment, financial panic, and demographic despair.
At the same time, where the legal rules of evidence were at first
temporarily set aside as impractical, it was now the very absence of
evidence that constituted proof of the crime. The only marker left to
recognize was race itself.

As Joan Dayan has suggested, the violence and degradation of
slavery can be seen as the reflection of French practices and values, a
kind of baroque mirror of French society. (107) As he searched for the
sources of poison in the island flora of Martinique, Dr. Rufz de Lavison
arrived at a similar conclusion: "the name of Brinvilliers is given
to an herb that has since been considered one of the principal agents
used by the blacks in their evil spells. It is not the only one of our
prejudices that arrived in this way from France." (108) Indeed,
another was the fantasy of uncontrolled aristocratic privilege and power
couched in the trappings of honor and independence that was the
cornerstone of the slaveholder's world-view. At the same time, the
idea of poison as the quintessential "weapon of the weak"
found ready adherents among whites on both sides of the Atlantic, and
the trope of the desperate, vengeful, and ultimately inhuman slave
poisoner was accepted just as uncritically by a French public that was
increasingly unsympathetic to slavery as it was by slaveowners.

Department of History

Bethlehem, PA 18015-3081

ENDNOTES

I would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of participants in
the 2005 Law and Humanities Junior Scholarship Workshop at which an
earlier version of the paper was discussed, as well as the financial
support of the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute for 18th Century Studies
and the Franz/Class of 1968 Fellowship at Lehigh University.

2. The colonial Provostial Court was still subject to the criminal
ordinance of 1670, which placed a number of formal restrictions on
magistrates' ability to issue the death sentence, especially when
the accused refused to confess. On the rules of evidence in the Old
Regime, see Richard Mowery Andrews, Law, Magistracy, and Crime in Old
Regime Paris, 1735-1789 (New York, 1994), pp. 432-441.

3. One estimate based on archival sources suggests more than six
hundred executed and more than a thousand others condemned to the
galleys, forced labor or deportation. Joseph Elzear Morenas, Precis
historique de la Traite des Noirs et de l'Esclavage colonial (1828;
rpt. Geneva, 1978), 323-324. The estimate is corroborated by the maitre
de requete, Baron Delamardelle, CAOM Mart. 52/431, reports of August 24,
1827 and March 27, 1830.

34. Another specific case is that of Leon, whose letter begins as
follows: "A poor slave, a French Christian, a man, in the end,
victim of a special tribunal, of irregular procedure, and out of his
love for justice and truth, determined today to kiss your knees to
obtain from your humanity that his appeal for royal clemency be placed
at the foot of the throne." CAOM FM SG Mart. 141/1270, Demandes de
grace des negres justicies; lettre de M. Leon, No. 40 provisoire, Bagne
de Rochefort, n.d.

55. "Towards the end of the century, physicians of the kingdom
maintained in their post by the government, came to join the surgeons on
the habitations. Their medical knowledge ... provided a fresh
understanding of the situation.... With time, this calming influence won
out over the surgeons of the islands who had absorbed the emotions of
colonial life ..." Christiane Bougerol, "Medical Practices in
the French West Indies: Master and Slave in the 17th and 18th
centuries" History and Anthropology 2 (1985): pp. 125; 130; 136.

57. Pluchon, "La Sante dans les colonies," p. 111.
Looking at the case of Barbados, Jerome Handler argues that most modern
scholarship has given the false impression that slaves had little or no
role in their own medical care; "Slave Medicine and Obeah," p.
57n. On the relationship of science and Enlightenment to views of the
body in the colonies, see Sean Quinlan, "Colonial Encounters:
Colonial Bodies, Hygiene and Abolitionist Politics in 18th century
France" History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): pp. 107-125, and James
McClellan, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime
(Baltimore, 1992).

58. According to Jerome Handler, obeah in the Caribbean derived
from various kinds of herbalism and medical practices that were
"probably composed of different, albeit broadly related, beliefs
and practices deriving from several West African ethnic
traditions." "Slave Medicine and Obeah," p. 82.

63. Philip Morgan, "The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic
Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New
World Developments" in David Eltis and David Richardson, eds.,
Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the
Transatlantic Slave Trade (London, 1997), pp. 127-128.

64. David Eltis, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: a Database on
CD-ROM (Cambridge, UK, 1999). The shift to the Bight of Biafra occurred
in the late 1790s, just as the British trade from the region was going
into decline. See also David Eltis and David Richardson, "West
Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: New Evidence of Long-Run
Trends" Slavery and Abolition 18: 1(1997): pp. 18-21; Serge Daget,
La Repression de la traite des Noirs au XIXe siecle: L'action des
croisieres francaises sur les cotes de l'Afrique, 1817-1850 (Paris,
1997), pp. 100-104; Josette Fallope, "Contribution de Grand Lahou
au Peuplement Afro-Caribeen (Guadeloupe-Martinique)" in Serge
Daget, ed. De la Traite a l'esclavage (Paris, 1988), p. 18.

66. Chambers, "'My own Nation,'" p. 83; Eltis
and Richardson, "West Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade," p.
21. Gwendolyn Hall and others have emphasized the reputation of Igbo
slaves for being suicidal, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, p. 255, but
her assumptions about ethnicity have more recently been questioned (see
Morgan, "Cultural Implications," p. 135), and to some extent
revised in her recent Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas
(Chapel Hill, 2005), pp. 166-168.

67. Examples can be found in CAOM Greffes Mart. 918, Cour
d'assise, St. Pierre, 1830-1832.

69. Gwendolyn Hall argues that the frontier character of the
Louisiana territories made it more possible for African cultures to
survive, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, pp. 159-161. Francoise Thesee
has described the fate of a group of Igbo slaves from a single cargo
ship in the early 1820s. Though some of these newly arrived Africans
worked as servants, perhaps even for some of the colonial officials
mentioned in the case described by Delamardelle, what is most striking
is the extremely high death rate in the group; see Les Ibos de
l'Amelie: Destinee d'une cargaison de traite clandestine a la
Martinique, 1822-1838 (Paris, 1986). Thesee does not suggest that slaves
in this group of Igbo were associated with poisoning crimes or
witchcraft.

70. David Northrup, "Igbo and Myth Igbo: Culture and Ethnicity
in the Atlantic World, 1600-1850," Slavery and Abolition 21 (2000):
pp. 1-20; Morgan, "Cultural Implications," p. 141; Femi
Kolapo, "The Igbo and their Neighbours during the era of the
Atlantic Slave-Trade" Slavery and Abolition 25:1 (April 2004): pp.
114-115; David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas
(London, 2000), ch. 9. For a defense of Chambers' position, see
"The Significance of Igbo in the Bight of Biafra Slave-Trade: A
Rejoinder to Northrup's 'Myth Igbo'" Slavery and
Abolition 23: 1 (April 2002): pp. 101-120; and Gwendolyn Hall, Slavery
and African Ethnicities, ch. 6. For a useful illustration of the dynamic
process of ethnogenesis in New World slavery, see Kenneth Bilby,
"Ethnogenesis in the Guianas and Jamaica: Two Maroon Cases" in
Jonathan Hill, ed. History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the
Americas, 1492-1992 (Iowa City, 1996): pp. 119-141.

74. Kristin Mann, "Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the
African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture" Slavery and
Abolition 22: 1 (April 2001): pp. 6-8. Philip Morgan has emphasized the
particularly pragmatic and adaptive approach to religion in West Africa
that could have facilitated a mixing of various cultural practices;
Slave Counterpoint, p. 612.

75. Dale Tomich, "Small Islands and Huge Comparisons:
Caribbean Plantations, Historical Unevenness, and Capitalist
Modernity," in Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital and the
World Economy (Lanham, MD, 2004), pp. 127-8; Tomich, Slavery in the
Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830-1848
(Baltimore, 1990), pp. 237-248.

79. For example, Dessalles bickered with his neighbor Lassale over
whether disease or poison had struck his livestock. La Vie d'un
colon, pp. 117-122, letters of July 12 and 18, 1824. See also the case
of Cesaire, letter of July 26, 1823.

80. This idea may be considered in tandem with David Geggus's
argument that slave revolts increased in proportion to economic
slowdowns in slave societies. See "The Causation of Slave
Rebellions" in Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, 2002),
p. 60. See also Yvan Debbasch, "Le Marronage: Essai sur la
desertion de l'esclave antillais" L'Annee Sociologique
(1961), p. 135n.

81. Cf. Mullin, Africa in America, p. 217.

82. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, pp. 630-1.

83. Mullin notes that obeah practices were sometimes seen as only
being effective within extended kinship communities; Africa in America,
p. 178. On the social dimensions of obeah, see also Barros,
"'Setting Things Right,'" p. 33.

84. Handler, "Slave Medicine and Obeah," p. 81. This
change over time has likely contributed to the confusion over the
meanings of obeah, including the idea that Myalism was often
(incorrectly) thought to be the "positive form" of obeah; see
Barros, "'Setting Things Right,'" p. 40.

85. Lynn Mollenauer, "The Politics of Poison: Courtiers and
Criminals in the Affair of the Poisons, 1679-1682" (Ph.D. Diss,
Northwestern University, 1999), ch. 3. The ultimate parricide of the
19th century, the killing of Napoleon, may well have been carried out by
means of poison, see Jean-Francois Lemaire, et al., Autour de
"l'empoisonnement" de Napoleon (Paris, 2002).

90. Annales du Conseil I: 497; see also Debbasch, "Le Crime
d'empoisonnement," pp. 169-171. On the use of black diviners
by whites, see also Barros, "'Setting Things
'Right,'" p. 36.

91. CAOM FM SG Mart. 123/1101, letter of Sept. 9, 1822.

92. CAOM FM SG Mart. 52/431, Memoire Riviere, 1829.

93. Jerome Handler argues that African slaves could succumb to
psychogenic illness when they believed they had been struck by poison,
but his analysis of psychosomatic processes seems limited to slaves, and
does not extend to whites. Handler, "Slave Medicine and
Obeah," pp. 76-77.

99. The present article does not address the occasional involvement
of petits blancs in slave crimes. I have focused on the responses of
planters, though I do not mean to depict all whites as acting en bloc.
On the complex nature of white creole identity, see Rebecca
Hartkopf-Schloss, "'The Distance between the Color White and
all Others': The struggle over White Identity in the French Colony
of Martinique, 1802-1848" Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University,
2003; and Georges Mauvois, Un Complot d'Esclaves: Martinique, 1831
(Grenoble, 1998).

I have felt the effect of his hatred, since nothing prospers with me.
He declared himself my enemy because he says my uncle Francois
denounced him as a poisoner. No matter how hard I work, I succeed at
nothing; my manioc has no roots, and it's the same with any land he
sprinkles. He is the enemy of [the white planter] M. Manuelle
Laserre ...; he told me he would reduce this landowner to carrying his
water. [Laserre] has in fact lost animals ... (28)

We had some corn that dogs were eating. Auguste told me to make a
callalou de Brinvilliers in which I put some ground up glass, codfish
bones and pieces of fish, to put it in this plot of corn and that that
would get rid of the dogs. It didn't work. After awhile I went to the
river to throw away this composition, and it became known; it took no
more than this to have us become known as poisoners. (31)

[Slaves] control their poisons so as to work only on those intended,
with no effects on others: they poison by knocking on or touching
something with their hands or a stick; sometimes by stealthily dipping
their fingernail, under which their poison is hidden, in a drink; but
more often they bury the poison either at the entrance or in some
location within a shack or in a field, and all a man or beast has to
do is pass over or near it to be struck down dead, either slowly or
quickly, according to the wishes of the poisoner. (88)